Kat Dunn > Quotes

“To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“It is terrible to be alive. But it is worse to be dead to ourselves.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I do not need to contain my appetites.

What is a monster but a creature of agency?”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“All we can hope for in life is to know one's own desires in order to be able to act on them. To want is to surrender to uncertainty. To step into the unknown. To expose ourselves to all possible outcomes and trust we will not be destroyed by disappointment.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“Disappointment tells us what we truly wanted. And to want is to be alive.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I want; it is a new and thrilling revelation. I can want, and it will not destroy me.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I learned quickly that my wants and needs were unwelcome, too great for any reasonable person to fulfill, and in time I came to agree with her. I was too much, too loud, too emotional, too clumsy, too self-involved. My existence was a burden to all involved with it, and I resolved to never make any demand if I could help it.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“A vampire is a creature of total want, of pure appetite, an antithesis to our self-denial, and I find myself picking through the bones of the story about the tension between these two states. Appetite is a dirty word for women, a cardinal sin. For food and sex, yes, but also for power, for ambition, for violence. What is Carmilla but a woman unleashed on any limits on her appetites? Does it make her monstrous? Is what we celebrate in men always monstrous in women? Is it also not monstrous to starve ourselves, to kill our appetite until we embody a living death?”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“Loneliness can be something other people do to us, and something we do to ourselves.”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“I wonder for what you hunger and whether you allow yourself to feel it.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“She hadn't been perfect. She hadn't even been easy. But she had been mine.”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“I made a bargain in my youth, for safety, for survival, and it has all been for naught. I am not safe. I have never been safe.

So why have I tried so hard to create it? All I have made is a prison.

But perhaps if I have never been safe, that means fear has no purpose.

I am not safe if I obey and reduce and control, just as I am not safe if I rebel and shout and anger.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I caught sight of myself in a mirror as I went downstairs and my heart sank. A beautiful dress on an ugly woman still made an ugly woman.”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“I hated her because I did not understand what it was that I had lost before I saw it in her.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I don't understand love,' I said, submerging the cloth in the water. 'I don't know how it works or what it is for. I've read poetry and novels and listened to music and viewed art all about love but it was like another language. I thought it must be something that wasn't meant for me. Until I met you.”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“The hurtful truth of death was that it was as mundane as a meal uneaten, a cup knocked over.”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“I furl myself in the quilt like an oyster in its shell with no pearl to show for the grit that works through it.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I had sown the seeds of love in grave dirt; who could say what monstrous bloom would grow?”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“Misery was a creeping thing, like the dew settling on grass or the cold fingers of frost meeting me in my bed at night and crackling the insides of my windows. I had longed to be left alone, to escape the lie of my family, only to discover this was different kind of poison. Slow acting, but lethal. At first it numbed me, pleasure leaching from my days like a summer leaf draining of sap to greet the autumn. Then loneliness came, a creeping oily stain that stopped me from enjoying it at all.”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“I remember only the sense that the whole world passed before me, and yet I belonged nowhere in it.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“None of us deserve our bad fortune, but that does not stop it from coming.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“Oh, little Lenore. It is terrible to be alive. But it is worse to be dead to ourselves.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“This is the bargain I have struck. To lose my softness in exchange for survival.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“Before, I stood on the banister of the balcony above the dining hall and thought the solution to the burden of myself was to end it all. How foolish that seems now. How futile. I could go, and no one would care.
How much better to make them all regret knowing me.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“If the world offers me no kindness, then I will take from it armor and sword, create an unassailable fortress for myself, and lock the door.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“Desire was falling off a cliff, and trusting you would not die. Desire was walking through fire and being reborn. Desire was an undoing. I was undone.”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“I kneeled in a graveyard and told myself it was paradise.”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“I will die like all mortal things.
At least let me taste a little life before I go.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“If you are a monster it is only because they have made you one.”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“What is a monster but a creature of agency?”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone